Katie Salen is an Associate Professor in Design and Technology at Parsons The New School for Design and co-author of Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals, a textbook on game design, as well as The Game Design Reader. Interested in games as both aesthetic and cultural forms, she has developed a critical practice that includes designing games of many different types, from big games, to downloadable games, to conference games and game-hybrids that take gaming as a point of departure. She writes extensively on game design, interactivity, and game culture, including authoring some of the first dispatches from the previously hidden world of machinima.